Fast Forward–The Art of the Italian Futurists

Apollonio, Umbro
Futurist Manifestos
Boston, Mass. : MFA Publications, 2001

On January 20th I heard our new president, in his inaugural address, speak about achieving our goals “when imagination is joined to common purpose.” I interpret this as meaning that in order to make the choices that the changing world presents to us, in order to move together with the times, we must envision what is not there yet, we must imagine the future. In the world of art “a movement” is often viewed as a departure from what is no longer valid and an engagement with new possibilities. The Italian Futurist art movement was based on this belief. And while the futurists’ and President Obama’s ideas differ in many ways, they share the tenet that imagination is essential to going forward.

A hundred years ago, our world was in flux. The industrial revolution had brought new paths and new problems. The world was not far from an enormous war that would reestablish the seats of power. Science and politics were reinventing themselves. The arts were engaged in revolution as well. On February 9, 1909, F. T. Marinetti, an Italian writer, published in a Parisian newspaper, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909.” This was a call to artists to break with the past and a dynamic commitment to a new aesthetic philosophy in which the embodiment of imagination would replace the representation of reality. In Futurist Manifesto, a 1973 edition published by The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a collection of the writings of the futurist artists give the reader vivid firsthand testimonies of the forceful nature of the Futurist vision.

The first of the manifestos is a call to arms, a fiery description of the writer’s epiphany that his automobile, as a metaphor for superhuman strength, must become his muse. It includes a list of principles which “exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride…” (21). Here, the tone is set for the style of the futurists. This was an art movement which embraced the Nietzschean will of man. Man, with his ally, the machine, would employ speed and power to recreate art and the world that it embodies.

In his first writing, Marinetti does not illuminate the aesthetic principles that should accompany futurist painting and sculpture; in fact he does not mention any art form but poetry. Instead, this manifesto served as an invitation to other artists to join him and elaborate on his declaration. In industrial northern Italy, a group of Milanese artists answered his call with “Manifesto of Futurist Painters 1910” in which they vow to “elevate all attempts at originality, however daring” (26). In the manifesto they speak of representing motion, not as a “fixed moment” but as “universal dynamic sensation itself” (27). While their contemporaries, the Cubists, were experimenting with representing still objects from multiple perspectives, the Futurists were intent on representing movement from multiple perspectives, thus collapsing space, form, motion, and time in a non-linear form. This central idea was incorporated into other art forms as well. In this book, there are manifestos written for music, and dance, architecture, and writing. Photography and cinema were extolled, not for their precise reproduction of real time and movement, but for their technological ability to create new art forms. For instance in “Futurist Photodynamism 1911” the photographic ability to trace the path of a movement with light is explored.

The theory that different art forms should be combined in order to come closer to the modalities that expressed the futurist beliefs is seen in many of the manifestos. In “Abstract Cinema- Chromatic Music 1912” cinematography was proposed as a means to explore the spatial and musical ‘mingling of chromatic tones’” (66).

Another important futurist idea was that in all disciplines, sensations, associated with the modern age, should and could be represented. In the “Painting of Sounds, Noises, and Smells 1913” Carlo Carra expounds, “We futurist painters maintain that sounds, noises and smells are incorporated in the expression of lines, volumes, and colours just as lines, volumes and colours are incorporated in the architecture of a musical work” (114).

It’s a shame that a book about the arts, in which many of the reproductions are of paintings and drawings, does not have color prints. I was looking forward to seeing the “the rrrrreddest rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuut.”, “greeeeeeeeeeeens, that screeeeeeam”,”All the colours of speed, of joy, of carousing …” (112).

This is a book filled with fresh and forceful writing on art and expression. The enthusiasm of the artist-authors is palpable on every page. The manifestos, while often polemical, and sometimes violently articulated, are full of innovation. They employ ideas which we use in our practice as teachers and learners at LCI, such as combining modalities, embodying the senses, exploring and discovering in a non-linear fashion, and using our imagination to envision new possibilities.

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